Course Correction (28 page)

“Yup, no problem. I can do that.” One day off and I'll be all better. Surely I could restrain myself that long. I'd dodged a bullet; a single day off in exchange for a full recovery was a bargain. I drove out to
my Waltham office and spent the day working, tending to customers' software problems, happy to distract myself.

Yet, somehow, five o'clock found me waltzing down the Weld Boathouse dock with my single balanced on my head, oars on the dock ready for duty. Sunshine reflected off every shiny surface. The river mirrored the sky's perfect blue with an extra dash of diamond sparkle. The brilliant late spring weather had lured me down to the river and onto the water, but I sternly promised myself no hard work, as if my words carried any more weight than the air they floated on.

It was twelve days before my first Olympic heat.

I launched, headed upstream, and warmed up to the top of the Head of the Charles course. The pain was gone. I felt loose. My skin heated up in the sunshine. Perspiration trickled down my arms and the back of my legs, and my tank top darkened as the sweat soaked in.

Lulled by the ease of my warm-up and the lazy afternoon sunshine, I didn't devise a workout plan. I followed my desperate, misguided intuition. First I rowed a pair of three-minute pieces at a moderate thirty beats per minute. Maintaining the rating was difficult, but I concentrated and stuck with it. I had to power through the discomfort with the rating to refamiliarize myself with higher cadences. Then I rowed a pair of pyramids: sequential sets of ten, twenty, thirty, forty, thirty, twenty, and ten hard strokes, with even rest between each. Then I pushed the rating back up to my normal race cadence, low mid-thirties.

And kept pushing. If I could just regain that familiar feeling of certainty that I could move a boat on a whim, that I was unbeatable, I'd be ready. I could tell I was close. I was approaching that sense of supremacy, reaching, ready to pluck it like a ripe, juicy apple hanging off a high branch. I could almost taste my returning speed. I was eager to reenter the flow of joy and reclaim the satisfaction that I could count on myself to deliver once again.

As I headed downstream back to Weld, passing under Anderson Bridge in the middle of my final power twenty, I felt a pop under my right arm, like a tiny balloon bursting. A hot stab of pain followed.

What the hell? I stopped rowing immediately, sat breathing hard for a minute, waited for the throbbing to abate, and then started again.

I lasted one stroke. The pain sliced so hard and deep that I couldn't make myself pull.

Oh, fuck, what have I done?

Wait a minute, try again. Maybe something got temporarily tweaked or twisted up. Deep breath. Pause. Another stroke, more gingerly attempted.

Same result. Shit!

I tried to make myself take another stroke. Linking up at the catch and putting pressure on my port oar felt as if I were thrusting a dagger into my side.

Come on, one more power ten. I girded for the pain. But advance knowledge didn't help; my will collapsed at the first jolt of pain as intense as an electric shock. It felt lethal. “Do what I say” lost its power: I couldn't make myself row.

If ever a person could rewind time, this would have been a fine time to locate the reverse button. I longed to return to the moment when I had conned myself into thinking a brief row would be okay and inject an instant of good judgment. Give me one last chance to go back and remind myself to withstand the pressure of shortsighted desperation, to stop my fear from dictating the terms of my game just for once.

But I knew I had just killed my dream.

I finally made it back to the dock, wincing with every stroke, flinching as my arm muscles accepted the load of pulling. My eyes stung with angry, bitter tears. This injury was not going to be shot away with cortisone or coaxed to a manageable level by pills. All the training in the world was no contest when it came to the kind of damage I sensed in my body. Beguiled by my own sirens, I had pushed myself beyond my physical capacity. Lifting my boat out of the water, I felt my pulse throbbing under my arm right where the bubble had exploded.

I couldn't listen to myself anymore, but the words wouldn't stop. They poured through my head and heart in a rush of hopeless anguish. You blew it, it's over, you fucking idiot, how could you have done this, whatever you just did, this injury—whatever is wrong—is not going away overnight. It's all over.

But I tried to keep going. I struggled through the next few days, trying to row my workouts in spite of the pain. Impossible. I couldn't take a single stroke without crying. The dagger in my side twisted deeper with every pull of the oar. Poison seeped into my thoughts. I was a goner and had no one to thank but myself.

I floundered even deeper. I reverted to old habits. I didn't return to my physical therapist. A diagnosis would do no good. I avoided Harry as long as I could. Dealing with my situation alone was unbearable, but at least I could stave off the demise of our relationship.

But I couldn't avoid him forever. After all, he was accustomed to my regular, impromptu visits. On the afternoon of May 1, I finally showed up at Newell and confessed.

“Why are you doing this to yourself?” Harry asked, sounding more incredulous than angry.

I had let him down, the guy who stood up for me when I couldn't stand up for myself, who taught me self-confidence by modeling confidence in me first, who loved me not out of obligation but because he couldn't help himself. I flouted his instructions, discarding his irrefutable logic. I flung myself beyond the reach of his training and experience, and landed in a desolate sinkhole.

Still, he stayed in my corner. He made me talk to him about what had happened, and he made me listen to his reaction, both his fury and grief. He forced me to reflect on what I had done: my reluctance to seek support when I was floundering, my insistence on going my way alone, and the resulting disaster and disappointment. How my fear directed me. How it was in charge, not me.

A lot of people would have given up on me. But Harry didn't disappear; he rallied: “You can win these trials if you decide to. It's up to you.” He took me out on the water, watched me row, and corrected my technique. He listened to my outpourings of despair and reminded me that I could decide how this story was going to turn out. I didn't tell him that I could see no happy ending: every stroke was painful, even on the paddle.

We kept working. On my last day in Boston before flying out to the trials, I took my final row. I told myself how much better my side felt. No soreness. I fantasized that my healing had started. By the time I landed in Long Beach the next day, maybe I'd be able to take some hard strokes.

Long Beach was a disaster. It couldn't have been otherwise. I went in the favorite and exited an abject failure. I looked good on the outside, but was a total mess on the inside. Harry and Lisa were three thousand
miles away. No one in Long Beach rooted for me; I expected nothing more. No one knew I was injured until the trials were over. I would give no one the chance to gain a psychological edge, nor would I allow myself a smidgeon of a justification for poor performance.

The entire Olympic sculling team would be chosen from the two dozen entries. The winner would represent the United States in the single. The coach of the quad would choose the next four through a selection camp process. The remaining athletes would pair up to race in another set of trials for the double. But I only had eyes for racing solo and claiming gold. Settling for a seat in a team boat smacked of failure. So I refused to contemplate plan B, as I couldn't think about losing the singles trials without panicking.

Racing was miserable. I got slaughtered in my first heat, losing to Lisa Rhode by more than three seconds—an eternity in rowing. I'd known I was in trouble before the race, but now everyone else knew, too. To earn a spot in the finals, I would have to win a repechage heat—a second-chance race for all the entrants who had lost the first round—and finish in the top three in the semifinals. I would go to the line three more times, if I were lucky.

After my first race, I half wished the ground would split open and swallow me, free me from the torture that lay ahead. I couldn't bear to contemplate losing the single and not making the Olympic team. Life as I had dreamed would vanish. The fast-approaching public humiliation already smarted, and my desperation ate me like acid.

I called my father from a phone booth at a noisy intersection, sobbing, “Dad, I blew it. I lost my heat.”

“Ginny, I can't understand you. What did you say? Slow down.”

I spoke more clearly. His response? “The question is, how much do you want it? How tough are you?” He was concerned, but he didn't realize what I was worried about. If he had known I was afraid of losing so much more than the race, maybe he would have known how to reassure me. But we had no history of talking about the hidden doubts that drove me.

“I do want it,” I said. “But I don't know if I'm tough enough.”

We hung up. My dream was teetering. I had set myself up for impossibility and even I was not a superwoman.

Although Dad couldn't provide any verbal reassurance, he flew out
for the semifinals and finals over the weekend. He watched me struggle without comment or judgment. He didn't run away, but offered support.

The next race, my repechage, was better. I eked out a victory against weak competition. The semifinals were next; the top three would progress to the final.

As I contemplated the semifinals and the increasing possibility that I might not win, I finally started thinking about the selection process for the quad. Even if I couldn't win the trials, I had to perform well. Even if I couldn't be the single, I wanted to make the Olympic team. I needed to position myself for the selection camp. I had to make the finals.

Harry coached me over the phone: “You have to maintain contact during the first four hundred meters. Don't lose your head or your control.” Racing had taught me well to ignore pain, but this time it was so jarring and so deep that I expended huge resources of energy to override its compulsion to stop. I had to force myself to pull the first few strokes off the line of every race, knowing that every catch would stab me. Ten strokes in, the normal pain of racing took over and I forgot my injury in my competitive frenzy. Every time I crossed the finish line and stopped rowing, the intensity of the reemerging pain made me dizzy. Still, Harry intuited correctly that if I could survive the start, I could live through the aftermath.

But my start in the semifinals was horrendous. I was solidly in fifth place, unsuccessfully challenging Joan Lind for fourth, admonishing myself, “Don't stop!” The pain made it hard to steer; I veered off center toward the starboard buoys of my lane. As I dropped my oars into the water for the next catch, my starboard oar tangled in the buoy line and caught under the water. My port blade reared up like a flagpole and propelled me over my submerging starboard rigger.

I landed in the water beneath my upside-down boat. This race was over. That was it. My feet released from their foot-stretchers, and I swam to the surface and grabbed my hull to stay afloat. The referee's boat pulled up seconds later and I climbed aboard, dripping wet, embarrassed, and disappointed. I had lost my chance to make the finals.

Still breathing hard and a bit stunned, I reached over to right my
single so the launch could tow it back to the dock. The head referee, Pat Ferguson, announced, “You were in contention. We're going to rerun this race.”

What? The race was nearly half over! Contention? What contention? What was she talking about?

Surely she wasn't talking about me. I had passed the four-hundred-meter mark before I flipped, far beyond the one-hundred-meter breakage allowance. I wasn't anywhere near the competitors who'd been vying for the top-three finishing positions.

But I had forgotten that Pat witnessed my come-from-behind finals qualification at the Worlds eight months earlier from the bird'seye view of the referee's launch. She saw me come out of nowhere and plow through the field to nab third place and a position in the finals, and row to a bronze medal the following day. She wasn't going to let the favorite sink so quickly out of contention, not after what she'd seen at the Worlds.

Having stopped the race and informed the other competitors of her decision, Pat directed the launch driver to head for shore. As we puttered by another rower in one of the adjacent lanes, I glanced at her. One of the Long Beach sculling crowd, another tall, well-proportioned Olympic aspirant, Beth Holacek, glared back at me.

“Hey, Beth, I didn't do this on purpose.”

“Sure looks like you did.”

I marveled at her conclusion. She unduly credited me with enough guts and quick thinking under pressure to flip myself and rely on a referee to stretch the meaning of “in contention.” Maybe it was easier for Beth to think I'd bailed on purpose than to believe I had simply rowed badly.

At the dock, the referees explained their logic. The Olympic trials were designed to select the fastest boat possible. Eliminating someone because of onetime bad steering could hurt US prospects at the Olympic Games. Of course, steering is part of racing, and poor steering slows boats down: I was pretty sure if a different somebody had flipped at the same point in the race and in the same relative position to her competitors, the race wouldn't have been recalled.

But we re-rowed. And Pat Ferguson was right. At the halfway mark
of that race, I was in sixth place. Then the pain receded, and once again, I managed to pull off a mighty sprint, sneak into third place, and earn a spot in the singles finals.

My luck and determination took me far. But winning the trials required perfect preparation, and mine was anything but.

So the following morning, my dream of singles gold officially died in the finals of the Olympic trials. I lacked power and intensity. I ended in fifth place.